Wrapping up #XUG2022

Thanks to all our speakers and everyone who attended the 18th annual eXtyles User Group meeting!
This year’s XUG featured updates on where eXtyles is going next, an overview of what’s new in the JATS family of DTDs (and how to harmonize ideal XML markup with the real world), a deep dive into the many uses of Auto-Redact, and a lively discussion of tools to improve accessibility and inclusion.

If you registered for XUG—whether or not you were able to attend live—you should already have received a link to watch the recorded sessions. If you don’t see the email in your inbox, please check your Spam or Junk folder! (And if you received the email but haven’t yet filled out our attendee survey, please do!)

Slides from all our XUG speakers are now publicly available on the main XUG page.

Powering a better research experience

In the run-up to the Frankfurt Book Fair, Wiley announced Wiley Partner Solutions, serving associations, publishers, societies, and corporations as they transform their business strategies and publishing processes in the open research era.

Partner Solutions hit the headlines at the Frankfurt Book Fair with a strong contingent—including Inera’s Robin Dunford—and a well-attended launch party on day 3 of the fair.

💡 See what Partner Solutions is all about, from the perspective of the team and our customers!

As well as Inera, the brands integrated into Wiley Partner Solutions include Atypon, Authorea, eJournalPress, J&J Editorial, Knowledge Unlatched, and Madgex. With the products, services, and talent available across this new division, we’ll continue to deliver the best of our portfolio in new and innovative ways.

We’re excited to be part of this new collaborative team, providing a broader and more integrated set of solutions to our customers!

💡 Here’s an example from XUG 2022 of what we’ve been up to with our colleagues at J&J Editorial!

NISO STS 1.2 is here!

As Debbie Lapeyre previewed at XUG 2022, Version 1.2 of NISO STS (ANSI/NISO Z39.102-2022) has now been published! NISO’s press release explains the highlights of version 2.1 from the perspective of the STS Standing Committee (co-chaired by Robert Wheeler of ASME and our own Bruce Rosenblum). You’ll find the updated standard on the committee page, along with the committee roster; supporting materials including the tag library, user documentation, and change logs on the NISO STS site.

eXtyles STS customers who would like to upgrade to NISO STS 1.2 should contact the sales team at [email protected].

What’s up with Modern Comments?

As you may have noticed (some of our Twitter followers certainly did!), Microsoft recently introduced “Modern Comments” into the MS365 / Office 365 software suite, slowly rolling them out to MS365 users over the past year. According to Microsoft, this feature update is designed to facilitate collaboration by allowing more extensive conversations in comment threads (e.g., users can now use @mentions to “tag” one another).

 

Adding comments in Microsoft Word is now officially awful. Why did they change this? Every time I comment I have to scroll to the right to see what I typed, which invariably has typos…

— Tom Mullaney (@tsmullaney) September 29, 2022

While there are benefits to this new functionality, our testing has discovered both that Modern Comments don’t always behave very well in Word and that they remove an important feature of eXtyles: the ability to use character styles (color coding) in comments.

So our Support team has put together a new FAQ with all the details on the issues you might see with Modern Comments in Word and current workarounds.

People of Inera: Sylvia Izzo Hunter

This feature will introduce you to newer Inera team members and help you get to know not-so-new team members better.

Sylvia has handled marketing for Inera since 2017, and community activities for Atypon since 2021; she’s the voice behind our newsletter and blog posts, and an organizer of XUG and the Atypon Community Meeting. In this month’s newsletter, Sylvia answers some questions to help you get to know her a little better!

Q: What’s your favorite thing about your job at Inera?

Like many Inerans, I was once an eXtyles user—while I never planned to work in marketing, it turns out it’s easy to market products you think are genuinely awesome, made by genuinely awesome, fun, and supportive people! (Inerans are also very nerdy—in all the best ways.)

I also love the Inera team’s attitude towards my job-adjacent volunteer work, which basically is, You go, girl!! This work is important to me, and it’s awesome to not only get to do it, but be appreciated for doing it!

I’m now transitioning into a new community-focused role with Wiley Partner Solutions, which I’m very excited about because it means getting to know my colleagues in other Partner Solutions businesses, their customers, and their products/services better!

Q: Tell us about your pets!

If you’ve ever been on a Zoom call with me for even 5 minutes, you’ve probably met Jackson Horatio Poodle. He’s a 5-year-old mini poodle who enjoys squeaking tennis balls, destroying cardboard boxes, frolicking in the snow, howling when fire trucks go by, and sharing his opinions (think “man yells at cloud”). Jackson has a middle name solely so that I can say things like “Jackson Horatio Poodle, WHAT is in your mouth?!”

Q: What are 3 fun facts about you?

1. I learned to knit about 12 years ago, and it’s become one of my favorite things. (We will not discuss the size of my yarn stash.) Need a baby hat or a pair of socks? Hit me up! But not crochet. Crochet defeats me 😕
2. I’ve been singing in choirs since I was 9 years old, so I’ve rehearsed and performed in some pretty interesting places, including an airbase in (West) Germany, the opening ceremonies of the 1988 Winter Olympics, a working monastery in Scotland, a national park in Australia, a tent in Wales, Expo ’86, and a school gym in South Porcupine, Ontario. (Yes, that’s a real place.) I’ve also sung in lots of less weird places, such as Roy Thomson Hall, Massey Hall, the Sydney Opera House, and a large number of churches in about half a dozen countries. Possibly my weirdest gig involved dressing up in a long brown robe and singing Carmina Burana for about 7 shows of a performance by Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal.
3. I really like owls. My favorites are the Great Grey Owl, which is large and impressive, and the Burrowing Owl, which is tiny and absurd.

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Q: What superpower would you choose, if you could only have one, and why?

I feel like I should choose healing powers or super strength or time travel or something, but to be honest, I’ve just always wanted to fly.

What we’re reading: Modern comments, image analysis, and more

Speaking of Modern Comments, we recommend Russell Harper’s deep dive into their implications for copy editors, recently posted on the Chicago Manual of Style blog. Less recent but no less relatable is this webcomic on the subject by Iva Cheung.

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In Scientific Reports, Daniel Moreira et al. describe “SILA, a system that makes image analysis tools available to reviewers and editors in a principled way” to detect image  manipulation. And in the just-published new series of Commonplace from Knowledge Futures Group, our Atypon colleagues Patrick Hargitt and Hong Zhou explain how the “ABCs” of advanced digital solutions are making a difference in editorial workflows. (Check out the rest of the series, too–especially this article by Bill Kasdorf on the importance of accessible systems!)

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On November 30, Stacy Lathrop of NCBI Bookshelf hosted NLM Office Hours! Read more about Stacy’s talk here; all Office Hour recordings are available on the class page.

Coming up soon: STM Week 2022, featuring a full-day master class on research integrity.

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On the Scholarly Kitchen, Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe interviews Simon Linacre about his new book, The Predator Effect: Understanding the Past, Present and Future of Deceptive Academic Journals. And if the interview piques your interest, you can read or download the whole open-access book here!

Word Tip: Check your macros

ℹ️ Our Word Tips are tested on recent versions of Word for Windows. If you are using Word for Mac, which has a smaller feature set, your mileage may vary.

Does your editing workflow include any in-house Word macros? If so, this Word Tip is for you!

As you probably know, Word is often set up to block macros in “files from the Internet” – for example, files you receive as email attachments or download from the cloud – because Visual Basic macros can be a vector for malicious code. Microsoft is now making this the default behavior, which means that even if you haven’t had macros blocked before, you may start seeing an error message.

This extensive Microsoft knowledge base article explains what you might see as a result of this security update, which kinds of files are affected, how to enable macros in files you trust, and more.

eXtyles users, fear not! eXtyles upgraded from macros to a COM architecture in 2018, so this change won’t affect any eXtyles install or process.

💡You can always find more Word Tips in our newsletter archive!